I went to a Chinese Restaurant to buy a loaf of bread....

Ok not really, but I did go to an authentic Chinese restaurant this weekend!  When i thought about writing my blog, the old hand clapping game came to mind....while googling this I found many different versions of the classic i recall playing on the playground as a kid.  Oh the memories.  So on to the Chinese restaurant...

Brian's employees decided to get their department together and have a family dinner on Saturday night.  Blake, Brian and I joined them at a traditional Chinese restaurant.  What I mean by traditional is of course the food, but also the style of the restaurant, you reserve a room essentially with one or two large round tables instead of eating in a large open restaurant.  From what I have experienced there are a lot of restaurants like this in Changzhou and I am sure the rest of China.  It allows for more private dining which is nice in this case, a little odd if it were just the three of us though.  There are usually main dining rooms as well for that instance where the three of us want to go out for Chinese food.  Since we were the guests, or Brian was their manager, I am not sure which one...they suggested we order the food.  In this case we would be ordering for all 11 people and not just personal dishes.  The menu I was presented with was in English but most of the translations made absolutely no sense and had nothing to do with the meal.  I swear, if you want a job as an English translator from Chinese they could really use you in our city!  (Note: I forgot to take photos of the menu to recall the translations but they were really goofy)

With the help of one of Brian's collegues and the waitress hanging over us with her handheld device for placing the order I flipped through the 30 page menu to start ordering.  It seems the method is to get cold meats first, then the hot food starts to come, a soup or two, then noodles and/or rice, and fruit to finish it off.  We didn't have to order drinks, they allow you to bring your own so a case of beer, coconut milk, mango juice and some soda pop were brought in and passed around the table on the quickly moving lazy susan.  So what should i order, I have no idea what half these things are, would it be fish, chicken, beef, pork or some foreign creature....was it spicy or not.....white sauce, brown sauce, red sauce.....vegetables......and then who knows what!  So i flipped through trying to order something from each page with a little help....some of the items we ended up with were cold chicken cooked with the skin on, Chinese yam with blueberry sauce, fish scored to look like a turtle on top of rice with gravy, spicy beef,  a whole fish (head included), salmon shashimi, spicy pork, spicy green beans, pork and shrimp fried rice, pumpkin puffs, pumpkin and potatoes covered in peanuts(shell still on), sauteed shrimp, sweet and sour fried pork (the only thing like home), soup (I can't remember the kind), noodles, fresh fruit.  As I provide the description mind you i did have photos to look at while ordering but it was still my best guess as to what it would taste like.  Here are a few photos I was able to snap while eating and feeding a 22 month old.

The interesting thing was before we all ate, everyone raised their glass and said "Cheers!" so my response was to ask what they usually say in China which was "Gam Bai!".  We all took a sip and started our first course of the meal.  Once this began the guys were drinking beer and looking at Brian saying "Gam Bai!" which i learned really means chug your drink!  When i did a search for the word here is the description I found,  

"In Chinese Gam Bai is like saying Cheers. It literally translates to bottom's up, but they take it all so seriously. You can't say, Gam Bai and not finish your drink, regardless of how much is in the glass."

So keep this in mind when traveling to China or you might get drunk much faster than intended, sounds like it has happened to a few foreigners.  Brian can drink a few beers pretty easily though and had a fun time with his colleagues (of course we don't drive here so we took a taxi home).

What an experience, going out with locals, eating the food and enjoying the culture!

I made one more trip to a Chinese place today....the UPS store....well lets say UPS hanger.  I needed to mail something to the USA that was trackable and would get there in a timely fashion which the post office here is not known for so I told the driver I needed to get to DHL, UPS or FEDEX.  I ended up in a run down office complex that had 8 or so UPS vans outside, a UPS sign and a small office.  The driver went in with me as i was questioning if this was a distribution facility for the packages to go on delivery or a UPS store where you buy boxes, mail items, etc.  As i went into the small office and told them what i wanted I found the man digging through a file cabinet to get the proper form for me, a nice surprise it was in English.  Then he flipped through a book to tell me the price to ship instead of getting on a computer and putting in the to and from address and zip codes.  Once the form was filled out and the contents were placed in the envelope I paid the main and he struggled to find change, it was as if there was no cash register so he ran around the office looking in drawers for the 2 rmb he owed me.  I tell you if this was in the USA I would have walked out and not even thought to ship something from there, in China I think this is normal and I have no other choice...lol  My driver seemed to think nothing of the experience.  Just a couple snapshots I took while mailing my package.

Just another week living in China.....

I am 30 weeks pregnant and we went for a doctors appointment and ultrasound.  Everything looks good, the baby is about 3lbs. 2oz. at this point and the heartbeat was 148bpm.  We are excited to meet this little one in the next few months!  We will relocate to Shanghai at 37 weeks to be near the hospital just in case!  Here are a couple of photos.  I am feeling pretty good, but very tired, this active little one keeps waking me up at night!